Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. has announced the development of technology that accelerates transaction processing for Hyperledger Fabric, one of the Hyperledger blockchain frameworks hosted by The Linux Foundation.
The blockchain is a technology that creates systems with excellent resistance to falsification while preserving high transparency and reliability, all without centralized management. It is expected to have applications in a variety of fields, particularly in finance.
Now, Fujitsu Laboratories has developed technology to speed up transaction processing by making the processing of communications between applications and the blockchain platform, which had been the source of bottlenecks, more efficient. In a trial where this technology was implemented in Hyperledger Fabric v0.6.1(1), it increased transaction performance by approximately 2.7 times compared to the previous method.
With this technology, it has become possible to apply blockchain technology to online transaction systems, which require high performance.
Details of this technology were announced at P2P Financial Systems 2017, an international conference about the blockchain held in London July 20-21.
Development Background
The blockchain creates a shared ledger system that, without a centralized manager, is highly transparent and reliable while being extremely difficult to falsify, by requiring the parties involved to mutually verify the accuracy of the transaction data and preserving it in a chain format.
The open source blockchain framework Hyperledger Fabric, being developed through Hyperledger, in which Fujitsu Limited is a premier member, is the focus of much attention as a blockchain that is building a robust commercial transaction platform. Hyperledger Fabric uses a consortium-type(2) structure in which the number of participants is limited, and is being trialed for use in a variety of fields, particularly finance, but also for supply-chain management in manufacturing, data conversion of insurance policies, real estate contracts, license management, and energy transactions.
With the blockchain, while consensus is formed between participating nodes, transactions are processed by applications reading and writing data on the shared ledger, with safety ensured by linking the transaction data in chain format to be managed.
Using its proprietary analysis technology, Fujitsu Laboratories learned that, under network conditions in which a response time of about 64 milliseconds or less is required, such as the case where a consortium-type blockchain is operated at multiple locations within Japan, communications between the applications and the blockchain platform during transaction processing are the primary cause of bottlenecks.
Future Plans
With this newly developed technology, in terms of performance, the Hyperledger Fabric framework has become applicable to online transaction systems that demand high performance in excess of 1,000 transactions per second, such as those demanded by financial institutions.
Fujitsu Laboratories will continue development of technologies to further speed up the blockchain while adapting them to the latest version of Hyperledger Fabric, and will carry out trials with a view to commercial applications of this technology, with plans to commercialize it through Fujitsu Limited during fiscal 2017.
